However to contain the life of Carrie Fisher in a single one-woman show? There’s simply too much material. She’s already written best-selling novels chronicling her alcoholism and drug addiction, her first marriage, to Paul Simon, and her second, to a powerful agent who left her for a man. Her stage show and her latest book, a memoir, both entitled Wishful Drinking, update that lurid history with her bipolar illness and electroshock therapy, among other tribulations. These include that dead body Fisher woke up to one morning—in her own bed—an episode that elicits particular fascination when she takes questions from the audience. “They’ve ranged from ‘How did you know he was dead?’ to ‘Did you kill him because he was Republican?’” recalls Fisher, whose friend died from a drug overdose.

But you can’t leave out Fisher’s pedigree (who else can claim a movie-star mother—that would be Debbie Reynolds—plunged into an international scandal when her pop-singer husband—that would be Eddie Fisher—ran off with Elizabeth Taylor?) or Carrie’s own Hollywood career, which took off with her infamous bagels-on-her-ears appearance as Star Wars’ Princess Leia.

When Wishful Drinking opens at Studio 54 this month, Fisher will be armed with the chalkboard she uses to diagram her family’s byzantine genealogy—a hilarious visual aid to prevent audiences from becoming hopelessly confused by the dizzying array of boldfaced names who have populated her life. It’s been a harrowing journey, albeit one liberally punctuated by acerbic bons mots about her admittedly rarefied milieu (“Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time &hellip; ”).

“The fact that I can make somebody laugh at this stuff—it can be very cathartic,” Fisher says. “If you claim something, you can own it. But if you have it as a shameful secret, you’re fucked; you’re sitting in a room populated by elephants. I have a lot of elephants to kill. But I also have a lot to be grateful for. Most of my problems are high-class. As Mike Nichols used to say, ‘The champagne is flat and the caviar has run out—will it never end?’”

Fisher can’t help herself; even when she’s weeping over the effect of her roller-coaster life on her 17-year-old daughter, she’s peppering her sobs with wisecracks. “I dream jokes in my sleep, and I make things funny that are not,” says Fisher (who turns 53 this month and sometimes enlivens her own acceptance speeches with the touching acknowledgment “I’d like to thank my husband, but I don’t have one”).

“There’s a line in Postcards from the Edge where Meryl Streep says to my mother, ‘We’re designed more for public than for private.’” Fisher sighs. “I’ve finally turned into my mother.